Golden Era Culture or Cultures?

[Flicka]

I spent tonight with my mother, trying to cheer her up after some bad news regarding her health. I played her some old songs - basically top Swedish hits from the '30s, and we discussed them thoroughly. It made me think about how we sometimes talk about the Golden Era as if there was one, singular, homogenous, culture. See, she said that her parents had never listened to that sort of music (they were born in 1920-25) and that her grandmother would have a fit due to the vulgarity of such music if she heard it. They were strictly classical and opera (and my grandparents might venture into some blues that they considered sophisticated enough) and never really a part of the popular Golden Era culture. I don't think my great-grandmother could even be persuaded to go to the movies as moving pictures were "vulgar" - I think radio was accepted as a necessity but not really approved of. Basically, what people now herald as "traditional" and good taste would actually have been the epitome of modern vulgarity to my grandparents and their families.

I know it's not news, but it reminded me of how much more complex the past is than I sometimes give it credit for and how much less homogenous the Golden Era was than it's mostly depicted in popular culture today. When we talk of "vintage", which past do we really refer to?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think when most people think of Golden Era culture, they're thinking of a pastiche of upper-middle-class white culture (the sort of glittery art-deco Rainbow Room type imagery) and urban African-American jazz culture (the jitterbug/zoot suit imagery). Neither of these were *typical* of the Era but they've been the most enduring images, at least since they were filtered thru the Nostalgia Craze of the early seventies, which created the modern pop-culture image of the period.

Nobody in my family had anything to do with either of these cultures -- my own personal Golden Era culture is that of the small-town New England white working class: people who worked hard, frowned on drinking, enjoyed Kay Kyser more than Stan Kenton, listened to Arthur Godfrey every morning, and were in bed every night by eleven. That's the only personal frame of reference I have, and that colors my personal view of the period. I can study and read about the other variations of Golden Era culture, and understand the differences between those cultures and my native culture, but none of them have that personal resonance with me. I wouldn't mind visiting the Rainbow Room or the Savoy Ballroom, but I'd be more at home at the bean supper at the Methodist church hall.

 

[Young fogey]

When we talk of "vintage", which past do we really refer to?

America from about 1935 to 1965.

Good point about variety in the era. Reminds me of the bad depictions of '50s America (all black leather jackets, jeans and poodle skirts; everybody's alike... a notion that Sha Na Na started in the very late '60s and was popularized in the '70s with 'Happy Days'... the Nostalgia Craze) versus the real thing (that was there but so were lots of other types of people).

That said, America had more of a shared culture including popular culture then.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That said, America had more of a shared culture including popular culture then.

That's a very good point. Every American of that generation -- except perhaps the most physically isolated -- knew who Joe DiMaggio, Father Coughlin, Amos and Andy, Dick Tracy, and Clark Gable were. They might not necessarily have paid close attention to such popular figures, but they knew and recognized the names. The popular culture of the era crossed demographic lines rather than hewing to them.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

I love this sort of discussion.

My grandmother, born in 1901, refused to bob her hair in the 1920s. According to my father, she said only "(loose women)" bobbed their hair lol. She had butt-length hair until the day she died so not every woman ran out to bob her hair in the 1920s as is usually portrayed. She was a small-town, working class woman who worked in a glass factory. I have letters from her to my grandfather dated 1937 and she was constantly writing about how "hot" and "bored" she was, so she wasn't out with the hip nightlife lol I know she went to see movies because my father told me she liked Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and Cary Grant (whom she said was the "the most handsome man.") Grandmother loved Rudy Vallee, but my father said she often listened to opera records instead of jazz or swing. Apparently, she was also a great piano player and singer. It's a shame I never met her -- she died in 1972 and I was born in 1975.

My other grandmother (born in 1929, still living) breaks a LOT of "golden era" stereotypes of women! "Mom-mom" (as we call her) was a nurse from the 1950s until the 1990s when she retired. She ALWAYS worked full time and raised three children. She was pretty much the "man" of the house because my grandfather was unstable and had serious anger/mental issues. He even did time in an asylum. Mom-mom has always been as solid as a rock and still is at age 82. She's never been a "meek and mild delicate little flower" as she is active in local politics and bowls once a week. She can cook an entire meal for a dinner party as well as renovate her own bathroom and maintain her own garden. Mom-mom was never part of the "Suzy Homemaker" 1950s utopian home that is often portrayed. I think she may have had a rough time then, but she will never, ever admit it. Mom-mom does not cry and she does not stand for being wronged.

 

[Canadian]

My grandmother recently published a book, which is a collection of her and the Colonel's adventures (the Colonel being my grandfather). One thing she mentions is that she was "rather saucy" and loved music. She was playing in dance bands from age 15 to just a few years ago. Her friends and her gathered around a radio to listen to pop music of the era. I suspect she was very atypical of the era. Of course, she wasn't the only one to like 30s pop music, but I suspect in the Great Depression, some things were more important than owning a radio.

Grandma noted in her book that she visited Camp Borden in 1953 to visit Grandpa who was in BOTC and he got a weekend pass. They danced to Mark Harmon at a posh hotel in Toronto, then ventured down into a square dancing club. They would rather listen to Harmon's dance band, because "those Easterners can't square dance". A great deal of her married life centered around performing and listening to dance bands. Even after all these years though, she likes Danny O'Donnel and folk legend, Ian Tyson.

I suppose it's like today. Everybody likes music. I had a friend who decided he was going to impress me on a drive to an airport 2 hours away. We started listening to Wagner, Chopin and Strauss. But as we chatted, he remarked that he liked a band called the "Goo goo dolls". We've been friends for years and while we like to fire up the opera and impress people, but I like a lot of things referred to as "bubblegum pop". Fifty years from now, maybe classical music will reflect the tastes of this generation, blended with older generations and what our kids refer to as classical.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

I think my Grandpa on my Dad's side was pretty much your typical guy during his era. He was born in 1930 and is still kicking today. In the fifties and sixties, he enjoyed music such as Dean Martin, Jim Reeves, and his favorite TV Shows of the music variety were Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw (barely qualifying as sixties).

He worked in construction (Union Lather) and built the family house in Suburban Milwaukee in 1951 (he was 21) and a 2-story Cape-Cod cabin 'up north' when he was 28 (1958).

He's a talented guy with his hands, and built furniture and racing boats in his free time. He married my Grandma Betty, who was a homemaker and they had five kids. Their life together is fairly typical of a Milwaukee family in that era, or so is my understanding.

 

[Flicka]

America from about 1935 to 1965.

Ha! See, that's not what I mean, being of the European persuasion. I'm also a '20s fan and tend to include that as well.

Anyway, I only need to look at my paternal and maternal grandparents and their respective families to see the vast scope there was. My mother's mother came from the sort of family with pretentions, where you changed for dinner (my mother scathingly calls them "small-town aristocracy"). She was a psychologist (I think she had a PhD) and was fiercely intellectual. My mother's father came from a family where academics were everything - they were 14 children and all of them (including the 7 girls) went to university/college (and they were all born in the teens and twenties). They were also a very musical family - his grandfather was a classical composer and his father taught music at a prestigious private school. Neither of them had much contact with "popular culture".

I know it's a much later era, but there's a pretty funny story about my grandmother flying first class to America from London in the '90s, and ending up next to "such a wonderful American woman". They shared family photos and swapped stories and the lady helped support my grandmother when she needed to get up etc. Gran told us that she thought the lady was some sort of musician because she'd said she'd been in London to do a concert. They'd talked tons about music and it had been soooo interesting. Unfortunately she couldn't remember her name. About a week later my grandmother triumphantly phoned my mother and told her that her friend from the plane was in the paper. My mother asked for her name and grandmother happily says: "Aretha Franklin. Did you ever hear of her?"

I honestly don't think she'd been able to pick out Dean Martin from a line-up either, and while she'd probably heard of Frank Sinatra, she'd never have played that sort of music. She loved old movies, but they were a bit of a guilty pleasure, as books was really the acceptable form of entertainment. She and my grandfather travelled a lot (all over the world) and worked for several years in Ethiopia in an aid project. She had a great interest in and respect for foreign cultures, so she wasn't really narrow-minded. Just, I guess, a snob.

If you look at my father's family... Well, his mother's parents weren't married and her father took off right after she was born. Himself, he was the son of a French variety singer and an unknown male, and was born on a train (literally). My paternal grandmother grew up in foster homes until my great-grandmother was able to take care of her, and she was the direct opposite of my maternal grandmother. She spoke the sort of working class Stockholm-slang that my mother sometimes could hardly understand and her children were raised on a wing and a prayer - when my father started school, his milk teeth were all rotten little stumps because she fed her children random candy rather than proper food. My mother said yesterday that she loved fun music you could dance to and dirty jokes, and I don't think she ever read a book or a newspaper. She could probably pick out every movie star there was, but I'm not sure she even knew who was prime minister.

So my mother's and my father's families represent two very different cultures within the same era and the same geographical area. They both represent "vintage" culture, only at very different ends of the spectrum.

 

[lolly_loisides]

I'm sorry your mother isn't well Flicka.
I knew what you meant There were big class divides in my family too. Wouldn't it be boring if the past was one big homogenous blob of conformity? It's the differences that make it fascinating. Oh, and if you think that vintage begins and ends with American culture then you're really missing out

 

[William Stratford]

...how much more complex the past is than I sometimes give it credit for and how much less homogenous the Golden Era was than it's mostly depicted in popular culture today. When we talk of "vintage", which past do we really refer to?

Absolutely. "Vintage" is strongly coloured by media representations; whether the movies who sold their "stars" as products or the modern pop-culture re-enactments along the lines of Jeeves and Wooster, Poirot or the Dorothy L Sayers mysteries...although I do have a soft spot for the original "Upstairs Downstairs". I suspect that Dorothea Lange's famous "migrant mother" paints a more accurate image of the era (in the US at least) than does the abundance of art deco and jazz.

To me, "vintage" means "hoary with age and rooted in tradition", rather than just an older piece of pop-culture fashion that is as consumerable and about consumption as any contemporary piece of bling or churned-out movie vehicle.

I think when most people think of Golden Era culture, they're thinking of a pastiche of upper-middle-class white culture (the sort of glittery art-deco Rainbow Room type imagery) and urban African-American jazz culture (the jitterbug/zoot suit imagery). Neither of these were *typical* of the Era but they've been the most enduring images, at least since they were filtered thru the Nostalgia Craze of the early seventies, which created the modern pop-culture image of the period.

Indeed. This is the aspect of pre-war social history that largely bypassed my own family (who were a mixture of household servants, farmers, smack-fisherman, stable owners and bicycle repairers), and which I prefer to ignore because it is just the beginnings of urban pop-culture that was just the disposable fashion of its day (rather than anything rooted and enduring).

 

[kaiser]

I think when most people think of Golden Era culture, they're thinking of a pastiche of upper-middle-class white culture (the sort of glittery art-deco Rainbow Room type imagery) and urban African-American jazz culture (the jitterbug/zoot suit imagery). Neither of these were *typical* of the Era but they've been the most enduring images, at least since they were filtered thru the Nostalgia Craze of the early seventies, which created the modern pop-culture image of the period.

Nobody in my family had anything to do with either of these cultures -- my own personal Golden Era culture is that of the small-town New England white working class: people who worked hard, frowned on drinking, enjoyed Kay Kyser more than Stan Kenton, listened to Arthur Godfrey every morning, and were in bed every night by eleven. That's the only personal frame of reference I have, and that colors my personal view of the period. I can study and read about the other variations of Golden Era culture, and understand the differences between those cultures and my native culture, but none of them have that personal resonance with me. I wouldn't mind visiting the Rainbow Room or the Savoy Ballroom, but I'd be more at home at the bean supper at the Methodist church hall.

This tends to hit it for me as well. I was born in California and moved to a small Indiana Town in 1968 when I was 9 years old. This was like a time warp for me as the small town was still locked into the late 1948's. I did not realize that at that time as a 9 year old tends to see things a little differently than an adult, but hindsight now shows me that the small town life then was very typical of most of America during the Golden Era. A good thing to do to see this is take a look at photo albums from this period of time and you will see how the common person lived. The bright lights big city take on this is only limited to a very small portion of the society during this period of time. This is however what a great deal of people tend to thing is the Golden Era as this is what we see in films, and media today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

This shows the fallacy of thinking of "decade" as being equivalent to "era." Whenever people say "The Sixties," for example it bring to mind a whole string of images -- protests, riots, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll -- which for a huge swath of the population were nothing more than images seen on television or as double-spreads in Look magazine. Many of us who were alive in the sixties had nothing whatever to do with "The Sixties" -- they were no more significant to our own experience than events happening on the surface of Mars.

 

[sheeplady]

I wonder how many people would have considered their great-granparents/grandparents/parents "old fashioned," "modern," or "boundary pushers?"

Growing up, I never realized my grandmother was a boundary pusher when it came to fashion and media consumption. But when she died in 1994 she had 3 piercings in one ear and 2 in the other, wore a pair of CK jeans, and enough rings on her fingers it was a wonder they moved. If she was alive today, she would have a tattoo and probably many more piercings. And she'd be wearing skinny jeans and yoga pants. lol

And I've got to say, if she looked anything like she did at 70, she'd be one of the few ladies over 70 who could pull off skinny jeans.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My aunt the longshoreman would probably have been a rough and tough "gender outlaw" type if she'd been born in 1980 instead of 1920. She occasionally mentioned that she always felt she would have been happier if she'd been born a man, and would spit on the floor to punctuate such statements.

My grandmother, on the other hand, wouldn't have been caught dead in "dungarees." Whenever she'd see a young woman wearing jeans she'd say, "Now why's she wanna go out lookin' like a ditchdigger?" She also thought ear-piercing was for floozies, "unless you're Italian." When I figured out from doing the math that she'd "had to" get married, she didn't speak to me for a week.

 

[MikeKardec]

When I look at the issue the first thing I note is that WWII altered the sense of what a 'decade" in popular culture was. WWI and it's aftermath ushered in the 1920s nearly on the money. The Crash heralded the depression and the era of fascism Europe and rising militarism in Asia. And even though Japan was already making war in China the fall of partition of Poland then the fall of France and Pearl Harbor make 1940 a rough landmark. But the end of WWII in 1945 kind of threw things off. Our vision of the 1950s is more of 1955 -1964, and the "'60s" ethos didn't disappear until the mid 1970s. In Europe things were a bit different, there were aspects of "The Golden Era" that lurked until the Regan/Thatcher years and yet some disappeared earlier. Of course some sense the 1950s and '60s stuck around in Eastern Europe all the way until the Wall came down.

After the war these eras are often defined by American pop culture but that's probably a pretty superficial way of looking at things. When I lived in Australia in the early 2000s I loved the way there was little inclination to divide radio music by decade or era or whatever ... at least not like the sort of play listing that goes on in major markets here in the US.

I think I'm most fascinated by the "lost decade" of 1945 to 1953 or so. In the US, Europe and Asia it was such an interesting time. The world was settling out from the war but HUGE things, new things were happening and we don't pay all that much attention to them today.

 

[Angus Forbes]

my own personal Golden Era culture is that of the small-town New England white working class: people who worked hard, frowned on drinking, enjoyed Kay Kyser more than Stan Kenton, listened to Arthur Godfrey every morning, and were in bed every night by eleven. That's the only personal frame of reference I have, and that colors my personal view of the period. I can study and read about the other variations of Golden Era culture, and understand the differences between those cultures and my native culture, but none of them have that personal resonance with me. I wouldn't mind visiting the Rainbow Room or the Savoy Ballroom, but I'd be more at home at the bean supper at the Methodist church hall.

This sounds just about exactly like my perspective growing up in Baltimore during the late 1940's on. My family lived just this way, and I still do to some extent.

One difference, however, may have been what was going on around me at the time. Baltimore was very prosperous in those days, and I saw how a lot of upper-middles and uppers lived. Then I attended a private school for grades 7-12 and got to know a lot of rich kids. Believe me when I say that the vast majority of them were very fine people indeed and have grown up to be first-rate, responsible adults, although there were and still are a few spoiled apples too, of course.

Although I was never especially envious, I saw that these families lived like kings -- and that view of the era has probably colored my vision. To me, the 40's-50's call to mind country clubs, good steak and bourbon, Cadillac convertibles, and a 100-foot ranch house in the suburbs, even though I never personally lived that way.